Far away, he heard his mother call him.
Mama.
He saw nothing, he knew that he was in the barn, he heard a terrible breathing near him, he thought he heard the sniffling of beasts, he remembered the sun, the railroad tracks, the cows, the apples, and the ground. He thought of tomorrow—he wanted to go away again somewhere tomorrow. I’ll take you with me, he wanted to say. He wanted to argue the question, the question he remembered in the eyes—wanted to say, I’ll tell my Papa you’re hurting me. Then terror and agony and darkness overtook him, and his breath went violently out of him. He dropped on his face in the straw in the barn, his yellow head useless on his broken neck.
Night covered the countryside and here and there, like emblems, the lights of houses glowed. A woman’s voice called, “Eric! Eric!”
Jamie reached his wooden house and opened his door; whistled, and his dog came bounding out of darkness, leaping up on him; and he cuffed it down lightly, with one hand. Then he closed his door and started down the road, his dog beside him, his hands in his pockets. He stopped to light his pipe. He heard singing from The Rafters, then he saw the lights; soon, the lights and the sound of singing diminished behind him. When Jamie no longer heard the singing, he began to whistle the song that he had heard.
Previous Condition
I WOKE UP shaking, alone in my room. I was clammy cold with sweat; under me the sheet and the mattress were soaked. The sheet was gray and twisted like a rope. I breathed like I had been running.
I couldn’t move for the longest while. I just lay on my back, spread-eagled, looking up at the ceiling, listening to the sounds of people getting up in other parts of the house, alarm clocks ringing and water splashing and doors opening and shutting and feet on the stairs. I could tell when people left for work: the hall doorway downstairs whined and shuffled as it opened and gave a funny kind of double slam as it closed. One thud and then a louder thud and then a little final click. While the door was open I could hear the street sounds too, horses’ hoofs and delivery wagons and people in the streets and big trucks and motor cars screaming on the asphalt.
I had been dreaming. At night I dreamt and woke up in the morning trembling, but not remembering the dream, except that in the dream I had been running. I could not remember when the dream—or dreams—had started; it had been long ago. For long periods maybe, I would have no dreams at all. And then they would come back, every night, I would try not to go to bed, I would go to sleep frightened and wake up frightened and have another day to get through with the nightmare at my shoulder. Now I was back from Chicago, busted, living off my friends in a dirty furnished room downtown. The show I had been with had folded in Chicago. It hadn’t been much of a part—or much of a show either, to tell the truth. I played a kind of intellectual Uncle Tom, a young college student working for his race. The playwright had wanted to prove he was a liberal, I guess. But, as I say, the show had folded and here I was, back in New York and hating it. I knew that I should be getting another job, making the rounds, pounding the pavement. But I didn’t. I couldn’t face it. It was summer. I seemed to be fagged out. And every day I hated myself more. Acting’s a rough life, even if you’re white. I’m not tall and I’m not good looking and I can’t sing or dance and I’m not white; so even at the best of times I wasn’t in much demand.
The room I lived in was heavy ceilinged, perfectly square, with walls the color of chipped dry blood. Jules Weissman, a Jewboy, had got the room for me. It’s a room to sleep in, he said, or maybe to die in but God knows it wasn’t meant to live in. Perhaps because the room was so hideous it had a fantastic array of light fixtures: one on the ceiling, one on the left wall, two on the right wall, and a lamp on the table beside my bed. My bed was in front of the window through which nothing ever blew but dust. It was a furnished room and they’d thrown enough stuff in it to furnish three rooms its size. Two easy chairs and a desk, the bed, the table, a straight-backed chair, a bookcase, a cardboard wardrobe; and my books and my suitcase, both unpacked; and my dirty clothes flung in a corner. It was the kind of room that defeated you. It had a fireplace, too, and a heavy marble mantelpiece and a great gray mirror above the mantelpiece. It was hard to see anything in the mirror very clearly—which was perhaps just as well—and it would have been worth your life to have started a fire in the fireplace.
“Well, you won’t have to stay here long,” Jules told me the night I came. Jules smuggled me in, sort of, after dark, when everyone had gone to bed.
“Christ, I hope not.”
“I’ll be moving to a big place soon,” Jules said. “You can move in with me.” He turned all the lights on. “Think it’ll be all right for a while?” He sounded apologetic, as though he had designed the room himself.
“Oh, sure. D’you think I’ll have any trouble?”
“I don’t think so. The rent’s paid. She can’t put you out.”
I didn’t say anything to that.
“Sort of stay undercover,” Jules said. “You know.”
“Roger,” I said.
I had been living there for three days, timing it so I left after everyone else had gone, coming back late at night when everyone else was asleep. But I knew it wouldn’t work. A couple of the tenants had seen me on the stairs, a woman had surprised me coming out of the john. Every morning I waited for the landlady to come banging on the door. I didn’t know what would happen. It might be all right. It might not be. But the waiting was getting me.
The sweat on my body was turning cold. Downstairs a radio was tuned in to the Breakfast Symphony. They were playing Beethoven. I sat up and lit a cigarette. “Peter,” I said, “don’t let them scare you to death. You’re a man, too.” I listened to Ludwig and I watched the smoke rise to the dirty ceiling. Under Ludwig’s drums and horns I listened to hear footsteps on the stairs.
I’d done a lot of traveling in my time. I’d knocked about through St. Louis, Frisco, Seattle, Detroit, New Orleans, worked at just about everything. I’d run away from my old lady when I was about sixteen. She’d never been able to handle me. You’ll never be nothin’ but a bum, she’d say. We lived in an old shack in a town in New Jersey in the nigger part of town, the kind of houses colored people live in all over the U.S. I hated my mother for living there. I hated all the people in my neighborhood. They went to church and they got drunk. They were nice to the white people. When the landlord came around they paid him and took his crap.
The first time I was ever called nigger I was seven years old. It was a little white girl with long black curls. I used to leave the front of my house and go wandering by myself through town. This little girl was playing ball alone and as I passed her the ball rolled out of her hands into the gutter.
I threw it back to her.
“Let’s play catch,” I said.
But she held the ball and made a face at me.
“My mother don’t let me play with niggers,” she told me.
I did not know what the word meant. But my skin grew warm. I stuck my tongue out at her.
“I don’t care. Keep your old ball.” I started down the street.
She screamed after me: “Nigger, nigger, nigger!”
I screamed back: “Your mother was a nigger!”
I asked my mother what a nigger was.
“Who called you that?”
“I heard somebody say it.”
“Who?”
“Just somebody.”
“Go wash your face,” she said. “You dirty as sin. Your supper’s on the table.”
I went to the bathroom and splashed water on my face and wiped my face and hands on the towel.
“You call that clean?” my mother cried. “Come here, boy!”
She dragged me back to the bathroom and began to soap my face and neck.
“You run around dirty like you do all the time, everybody’ll call you a little nigger, you hear?” She rinsed my face and looked at my hands and dried me. “Now, go on and eat your supper.”
I didn’t
say anything. I went to the kitchen and sat down at the table. I remember I wanted to cry. My mother sat down across from me.
“Mama,” I said. She looked at me. I started to cry.
She came around to my side of the table and took me in her arms.
“Baby, don’t fret. Next time somebody calls you nigger you tell them you’d rather be your color than be lowdown and nasty like some white folks is.”
We formed gangs when I was older, my friends and I. We met white boys and their friends on the opposite sides of fences and we threw rocks and tin cans at each other.
I’d come home bleeding. My mother would slap me and scold me and cry.
“Boy, you wanna get killed? You wanna end up like your father?”
My father was a bum and I had never seen him. I was named for him: Peter.
I was always in trouble: truant officers, welfare workers, everybody else in town.
“You ain’t never gonna be nothin’ but a bum,” my mother said.
By and by older kids I knew finished school and got jobs and got married and settled down. They were going to settle down and bring more black babies into the world and pay the same rents for the same old shacks and it would go on and on—
When I was sixteen I ran away. I left a note and told Mama not to worry, I’d come back one day and I’d be all right. But when I was twenty-two she died. I came back and put my mother in the ground. Everything was like it had been. Our house had not been painted and the porch floor sagged and there was somebody’s raincoat stuffed in the broken window. Another family was moving in.
Their furniture was stacked along the walls and their children were running through the house and laughing and somebody was frying pork chops in the kitchen. The oldest boy was tacking up a mirror.
Last year Ida took me driving in her big car and we passed through a couple of towns upstate. We passed some crumbling houses on the left. The clothes on the line were flying in the wind.
“Are people living there?” asked Ida.
“Just darkies,” I said.
Ida passed the car ahead, banging angrily on the horn. “D’you know you’re becoming paranoiac, Peter?”
“All right. All right. I know a lot of white people are starving too.”
“You’re damn right they are. I know a little about poverty myself.”
Ida had come from the kind of family called shanty Irish. She was raised in Boston. She’s a very beautiful woman who married young and married for money—so now I can afford to support attractive young men, she’d giggle. Her husband was a ballet dancer who was forever on the road. Ida suspected that he went with boys. Not that I give a damn, she said, as long as he leaves me alone. When we met last year she was thirty and I was twenty-five. We had a pretty stormy relationship but we stuck. Whenever I got to town I called her; whenever I was stranded out of town I’d let her know. We never let it get too serious. She went her way and I went mine.
In all this running around I’d learned a few things. Like a prizefighter learns to take a blow or a dancer learns to fall, I’d learned how to get by. I’d learned never to be belligerent with policemen, for instance. No matter who was right, I was certain to be wrong. What might be accepted as just good old American independence in someone else would be insufferable arrogance in me. After the first few times I realized that I had to play smart, to act out the role I was expected to play. I only had one head and it was too easy to get it broken. When I faced a policeman I acted like I didn’t know a thing. I let my jaw drop and I let my eyes get big. I didn’t give him any smart answers, none of the crap about my rights. I figured out what answers he wanted and I gave them to him. I never let him think he wasn’t king. If it was more than routine, if I was picked up on suspicion of robbery or murder in the neighborhood, I looked as humble as I could and kept my mouth shut and prayed. I took a couple of beatings but I stayed out of prison and I stayed off chain gangs. That was also due to luck, Ida pointed out once. “Maybe it would’ve been better for you if you’d been a little less lucky. Worse things have happened than chain gangs. Some of them have happened to you.”
There was something in her voice. “What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Don’t lose your temper. I said maybe.”
“You mean you think I’m a coward?”
“I didn’t say that, Peter.”
“But you meant that. Didn’t you?”
“No. I didn’t mean that. I didn’t mean anything. Let’s not fight.”
There are times and places when a Negro can use his color like a shield. He can trade on the subterranean Anglo-Saxon guilt and get what he wants that way; or some of what he wants. He can trade on his nuisance value, his value as forbidden fruit; he can use it like a knife, he can twist it and get his vengeance that way. I knew these things long before I realized that I knew them and in the beginning I used them, not knowing what I was doing. Then when I began to see it, I felt betrayed. I felt beaten as a person. I had no honest place to stand.
This was the year before I met Ida. I’d been acting in stock companies and little theaters; sometimes fairly good parts. People were nice to me. They told me I had talent. They said it sadly, as though they were thinking, What a pity, he’ll never get anywhere. I had got to the point where I resented praise and I resented pity and I wondered what people were thinking when they shook my hand. In New York I met some pretty fine people; easygoing, hard-drinking, flotsam and jetsam; and they liked me; and I wondered if I trusted them; if I was able any longer to trust anybody. Not on top, where all the world could see, but underneath where everybody lives.
Soon I would have to get up. I listened to Ludwig. He shook the little room like the footsteps of a giant marching miles away. On summer evenings (and maybe we would go this summer) Jules and Ida and I would go up to the Stadium and sit beneath the pillars on the cold stone steps. There it seemed to me the sky was far away; and I was not myself, I was high and lifted up. We never talked, the three of us. We sat and watched the blue smoke curl in the air and watched the orange tips of cigarettes. Every once in a while the boys who sold popcorn and soda pop and ice cream climbed the steep steps chattering; and Ida shifted slightly and touched her blue-black hair; and Jules scowled. I sat with my knee up, watching the lighted half-moon below, the black-coated, straining conductor, the faceless men beneath him moving together in a rhythm like the sea. There were pauses in the music for the rushing, calling, halting piano. Everything would stop except the climbing soloist; he would reach a height and everything would join him, the violins first and then the horns; and then the deep blue bass and the flute and the bitter trampling drums; beating, beating and mounting together and stopping with a crash like daybreak. When I first heard the Messiah I was alone; my blood bubbled like fire and wine; I cried; like an infant crying for its mother’s milk; or a sinner running to meet Jesus.
Now below the music I heard footsteps on the stairs. I put out my cigarette. My heart was beating so hard I thought it would tear my chest apart. Someone knocked on the door.
I thought: Don’t answer. Maybe she’ll go away.
But the knocking came again, harder this time.
Just a minute, I said. I sat on the edge of the bed and put on my bathrobe. I was trembling like a fool. For Christ’s sake, Peter, you’ve been through this before. What’s the worst thing that can happen? You won’t have a room. The world’s full of rooms.
When I opened the door the landlady stood there, red-and-whitefaced and hysterical.
“Who are you? I didn’t rent this room to you.”
My mouth was dry. I started to say something.
“I can’t have no colored people here,” she said. “All my tenants are complainin’. Women afraid to come home nights.”
“They ain’t gotta be afraid of me,” I said. I couldn’t get my voice up; it rasped and rattled in my throat; and I began to be angry. I wanted to kill her. “My friend rented this room for me,” I said.
“Well, I’m so
rry, he didn’t have no right to do that, I don’t have nothin’ against you, but you gotta get out.”
Her glasses blinked, opaque in the light on the landing. She was frightened to death. She was afraid of me but she was more afraid of losing her tenants. Her face was mottled with rage and fear, her breath came rushed and little bits of spittle gathered at the edges of her mouth; her breath smelled bad, like rotting hamburger on a July day.
“You can’t put me out,” I said. “This room was rented in my name.” I started to close the door, as though the matter was finished: “I live here, see, this is my room, you can’t put me out.”
“You get outa my house!” she screamed. “I got the right to know who’s in my house! This is a white neighborhood, I don’t rent to colored people. Why don’t you go on uptown, like you belong?”
“I can’t stand niggers,” I told her. I started to close the door again but she moved and stuck her foot in the way. I wanted to kill her, I watched her stupid, wrinkled frightened white face and I wanted to take a club, a hatchet, and bring it down with all my weight, splitting her skull down the middle where she parted her iron-grey hair.
“Get out of the door,” I said. “I want to get dressed.”
But I knew that she had won, that I was already on my way. We stared at each other. Neither of us moved. From her came an emanation of fear and fury and something else. You maggot-eaten bitch, I thought. I said evilly, “You wanna come in and watch me?” Her face didn’t change, she didn’t take her foot away. My skin prickled, tiny hot needles punctured my flesh. I was aware of my body under the bathrobe; and it was as though I had done something wrong, something monstrous, years ago, which no one had forgotten and for which I would be killed.
“If you don’t get out,” she said, “I’ll get a policeman to put you out.”
I grabbed the door to keep from touching her. “All right. All right. You can have the goddamn room. Now get out and let me dress.”
She turned away. I slammed the door. I heard her going down the stairs. I threw stuff into my suitcase. I tried to take as long as possible but I cut myself while shaving because I was afraid she would come back upstairs with a policeman.